Why Buy Fair Trade Products?
Across the world, labourers-including children-are forced to work up to 16 hours a day in inhumane working conditions to earn less than a pound a day. The middlemen take a big chunk of their profits and they receive only a fraction of their product's worth. To increase their profits, farmers have to use pesticides and chemicals to harvest a bigger produce, causing damage to the soil and the humans ingesting the food grown in it. This picture keeps rolling over and over again while we are busy spending twice as much every year on computer games than it would cost to provide basic water and sanitation to all.
Every fair trade product you buy helps alleviate poverty, socioeconomic inequality, environmental destruction and the exploitation of workers in developing countries. This gives them security, empowerment, and the ability to plan and save-many of the things we usually take for granted.
By purchasing fairly traded products, you help readjust the lopsided balance of wealth since it delivers a greater share of the profits to those who worked hard to earn them-the growers, harvesters and artisans of developing countries around the world. You secure a brighter future for the producers and their families by safeguarding them against the ever-changing price of their product on the world market and help them eliminate the middlemen who take a big share of their profits.
Fair trade principles guarantee the producers a 'social premium' which they can invest in their business and strengthen their communities with. The guidelines established for the Fairtrade Mark also require justice and good stewardship of the producers, whether they are small farmers' organisations or employers on plantations and in factories. It improves democracy and transparency in the workplace, allowing workers to join in decisions and become stakeholders in their businesses. Employers undertake to comply with minimum health and safety as well as environmental standards, and not to use child or forced labour. 'Process requirements' promote constant improvement in working conditions and product quality.
In the agricultural sector, fair trade promotes sustainable development by limiting agrochemical use and employing sustainable practices such as soil management and water conservation. Moreover, fair trade certifiers educate producers about sustainability and encourage and aid them to gain organic certification.
Another reason to choose fair trade products is their uniqueness and quality. These products are not mass-manufactured by thousands of factory employees working on a production line; rather each fair trade product represents someone's hard work and investment by a motivated and rewarded workforce-good ingredients for a quality product!
Fair trade products make terrific gifts. The person you gift them to will not only be pleased but at the same time you send out a message to the rich, exploitative corporations that you do not and will not support their aggressive tactics of bringing down costs by denying the producers their right to an equitable slice of the profits, healthcare and safe and hygienic working conditions.